Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has warned users of Red Hat Linux that they will have to pay Microsoft for its intellectual property. "People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us," Ballmer said last week at a company event in London discussing online services in the UK.

Wishing for something to be true doesn't mean it is or ever would be true: the number of seats for all the "big engineering applications" is a rather self-limiting market by nature of the fact that it's "engineering" that requires far more than the average bear knows and comprehends in order to be useful, and the situations where the software is of value is also that limited. I've worked on such applications personally, and the number of seats (if you're doing well) numbers somewhere in the thousands for the higher-end 3D stuff. Why do you think Microsoft has never entered the fray of that market? Surely, they have the software engineering resources that if they truly wanted to, they could throw resources at it over a period of time and within a few years, they'd have something that could take on AutoCAD or Kubotek KeyCreator (what I worked on until I was laid off) ProEngineer or the other few in the field.

A HUGE thing that makes it less likely for most of those high-end packages from ever being ported to all the linux distros is precisely because there's so many mutations to choose from, and the QA testing nightmare involved. Microsoft Office is a simple thing to test for correct behavior and add new behavior, compared to complex 3D CAD software, because whatever minor nitpicky output might actually be considered a defect, at least one customer has critical drawings that were used for manufacturing their products from that, and they aren't that forgiving of their resulting products changing from one "minor" change of behavior between fixes/updates. As much as Linux and mutations change in small, subtle ways and not-so-subtle ways, combined with the practical observation that everyone else in an organization is already using Microsoft Office and other applications for managing workflow, budgeting, etc. that's all nicely integrated, that (AFAIK) isn't currently available for Linux that's not custom-written.

Microsoft bought SoftImage (previously SGI-based animation/rendering suite) in 1994 essentially to ensure it only ran on Windows, presumably in the hope that this would lock the SGI-centric film industry into the Windows platform because Softimage was so widely used and well regarded.

When this utterly failed to eventuate (because of how long it took to get the Windows Softimage working properly (early versions were awful, to say the least) - this is the product now known as Softimage XSI., and the massive popularity of Maya in that market, partly due to Softimage's woes), they sold Softimage off to Avid (MS is a shareholder in Avid, not sure if its because of this deal or not) in 1998, who seem to have done a pretty good job of delivering on the initial architectural promises made around Softimage XSI, though i believe it is still a Windows-only product, and doesn't have anything like the market penetration in the film industry it once had.

Basically, the 'entered the fray', destroyed a well loved company (SGI) through Rick Belluzzo (another story, but googling for 'sgi rick belluzzo' should make it clear enough what happened), all but killed Softimage's presence in the high end 3D film market, and eventually just gave up and went back to its standard monopolist practice of forcing the bundling of office and windows, i guess because theyre just not effective outside their core business.

There is a linux version XSI, but like you said by the time this happened Alias was already there and back again. I happen to think that XSi is a superior product to Maya, and the program is rather elegant and well put together considering its origins.